MediaTek, Taiwan’s largest chip designer, said it will launch 4G LTE products in China more quickly than the company did in the 3G business to capture strong demand in the world’s largest handset market.

“China’s LTE market growth has been strong,” MediaTek President Ching-Jiang Hsieh said during an announcement of the company’s third-quarter earnings for this year. MediaTek will be “faster with LTE than with 3G” in market entry, he said.

The chip designer aims to pare Qualcomm’s lead in China’s 4G smartphone market with the launch of a new octa-core processor in the first quarter of 2015. MediaTek earlier this year started sampling its MT6795, a new 64-bit LTE True Octa-core SoC, part of a product lineup of LTE chips next year aimed at matching Qualcomm’s existing range of high, medium and low-end products.

The company will double its output of LTE chips from 10 percent of total production in the third quarter this year to 20 percent during the fourth quarter, Hsieh said.

MediaTek in October announced its MT6735, which incorporates four 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 processors and extends the company’s LTE lineup by adding WorldMode modem capability. The MT6735 line will be positioned in the same range as Qualcomm’s recently announced Snapdragon 210, both addressing low-end price points.

MediaTek said it is on track with its expectations to ship more than 350 million smartphone chips this year, among which more than 30 million will be LTE products.

The company said that in the fourth quarter, it expects to ship about 90 million to 100 million smartphone chips and about 40 million chips for tablets. The tablet market will grow next year, albeit at a slower pace, MediaTek said.

This article was originally published on EETimes.